The present invention relates to a technology for providing incentives for e-commerce shoppers to purchase products, and more particularly to a technology for providing progressive e-commerce.
Traditional methods of selling goods and services have involved the use of incentives. For example, merchants at brick and mortar stores offer deals such as “buy one get one free.” This marketing technique is known in the marketing industry as BOGOF or BOGO and is a very effective form of offering special deals for goods. In addition, many companies offer reward programs for brand loyalty. For example, airline companies allow customers to participate in frequent flyer programs to provide round trip airline tickets after a predetermined amount of miles have been flown. Other companies offer loyalty cards where a customer is given a gift card after purchasing a predetermined dollar amount. These loyalty programs have been successful in giving adequate incentives for shoppers to buy goods/services.
In recent years, the Internet has changed the way merchants market and sell their products to buyers. Websites such as Amazon.com offer books and other products, and the website Zappos.com focuses on selling shoes. These websites include a secure transaction webpage where the shopper can enter his or her credit card information (or use PayPal or any other similar online payment processor) to purchase various products. Some websites offer one specific product for one day only (“one day sale”), while other websites sell products with a variable price that decreases as more people buy the product until their inventory runs out.
For purposes of discussion, the term “webpage” is defined as a document or resource of information found on the Internet that can be accessed through a web browser and displayed on a computer screen. The term “website” is defined as a collection of related webpages, images, videos, or other digital assets that are addressed with a common domain name or IP address in an Internet Protocol-based network. A website is hosted on at least one web server, and is accessible via a network such as the Internet or a private local area network.
Furthermore, companies have embraced reward programs with electronic commerce (or “e-commerce”) to sell goods and services. E-commerce involves the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. The amount of trade conducted electronically has grown significantly with the widespread adoption of broadband Internet. For example, ShopSite offers a customer rewards program that includes the traditional BOGO rewards program. CDnow has launched a customer incentive program called Fast Forward Rewards that gives customers points that can be redeemed online for merchandise. Shoppers who purchase from CDnow earn reward points for every dollar spent. Customers can cash in their points for a variety of CDnow products from the Fast Forward Rewards Catalogue. Another example of an e-commerce site is Groupon, which offers a deal of the day to local markets. When a certain number of people sign up for the deal of the day offer, the deal becomes available to all. However, the website requires that a predetermined minimum be reached. If this predetermined minimum is not met, no one gets the deal of that day.
However, in the case of conventional e-commerce reward websites, the use of progressive incentives tied to digital goods is not prevalent. In addition, conventional e-commerce websites seem to lack any display of progressive incentives to lure e-commerce shoppers to purchase products.
The present invention has been made to solve the above problems, and an object of the present invention is to provide methods and systems for progressive e-commerce. Another object of the present invention is to provide digital goods that can be unlocked to act as incentives for e-commerce shoppers to purchase products.